An overnight press release confirms that Autonomy’s acquisition of Interwoven has been finalised. It has been understandably difficult to get any useful comment out of either of them (I have tried) whilst the transaction was awaiting the formal approvals necessary to close it.
For those who have invested in Interwoven’s content management applications, it will be reassuring to read that “Autonomy is committed to the on-going development and support of Interwoven’s products and solutions in line with all currently published Interwoven roadmaps.”
What interests my readers is the hosted document review platform Discovery Mining, which Interwoven itself only acquired during 2008. Of this, Anthony Bettencourt, CEO of Autonomy Interwoven, says:
For Interwoven’s Discovery Mining customers, Autonomy offers the most complete EDRM solution on a single technology platform…. We will bring together the best aspects of Discovery Mining and Zantaz Introspect to meet your current and future processing, review and production needs. Autonomy has 6 data centers with 6,000 servers, and Discovery Mining will now become our West Coast processing center while Boston will remain our East Coast processing center.
That tells us little about actual development of the highly-regarded Discovery Mining application. My informal understanding (which makes logical sense) is that Autonomy’s IDOL engine will be put under Discovery Mining. It is not really clear whether we will see the convergence of Introspect and Discovery Mining into a single product or whether the two applications will be differentiated and aimed at different markets. It would not be surprising if long-term decisions like this have yet to be made.